


Beautiful

by Leamas



Category: Declare - Tim Powers
Genre: Other, Pre-Epilogue, bad things happen to Kim Philby, deity/demon fucking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-13
Updated: 2017-04-13
Packaged: 2018-10-18 10:22:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10614921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leamas/pseuds/Leamas
Summary: It was possession; the act of wanting, and taking.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to [vials](http://archiveofourown.com/users/vials) for offering his expertise on how to survive sexual encounters with demons/djinn.

_Beautiful_ was too broad a description; Litzi, with the sharp angles of her jaw and her dark hair, had been beauitful; Eleanor had been beautiful with her broad smile and the high arches of her eyebrows. Elena had been memorable. The wisps of white hair that framed her face highlighted her dark eyes that hated him. Machikha Nash was also memorable. From when Kim first saw her he understood that. She was like fire that he wanted to hold or the sharp drop at the end of a cliff: an invitation he had to decline, or an experience he couldn’t have unless he submerged himself within its giant emptiness. He wanted her. Did that make her beautiful?

When she walked down the street she hugged the walls; crowds parted at her presence. Most of the time Kim thought they didn’t see her. There was simply something about how she walked that warped space and pushed people away from her, like one’s need to bend one’s legs on a rocking ship at sea. Sometimes Kim caught others watching her. They stilled, and their eyes widened; they were pulled from the present moment and suspended in time for as long as it took them to understand what they were seeing. Usually they would run afterwards, sometimes on shaky legs. Once Kim saw an elderly man faint. When he looked back to where she had stood, she was gone.

What was that, if not beauty? The skies turned above her, moved by her existence. Kim’s eyes were drawn to her for as long as he was determined not to fall to his knees from the dizziness, and the perceived loudness. (He never thought of any way else to describe that; if asked, he would not be able to explain what he heard, but when the moment passed and the buildings righted themselves against, his ears always rang and he listened to the sound of the streets as though hearing them for the first time.)

When he watched her, he could see the shape of her body; her dark brown skin that glowed; the clothing she wore that moved a step too late for her. He wanted to touch her; to take her home with him and have his way with her.

If he was especially unlucky she would turn, and see him, and he would catch sight of her face – the smooth contours of her jaw; her full cheeks in a country where so many people starved; her high eyebrows; the beads from her headscarf that dipped across her forehead. Her face was not symmetrical, or perfect; there was nothing inhuman about its beauty, except for her eyes. Kim didn’t know how he came to understand this, but her gaze swallowed more than what her dark brown eyes could take in, and stole everything to someplace where they could be understood on a deeper level than her human body allowed: someplace where there was no graduation between her eyes and the light; where mirrors were unnecessary because there was no distinction between _seeing_ and _being_.

Kim wondered who the woman had been, before her body was given to Machikha Nash. Had she given it willingly? Or had she been like Kim: a willing player in circumstances that were already decided for her? Kim wanted to press his body close to hers and feel Machikha Nash’s presence filtered through the body this poor woman.

He could feel when her attention fixated on him. Something in him prickled – a sensation he couldn’t identify, like a repressed instinct to flinch. He often thought of Andrew in those moments; once, he dreamt of using his body as a filter through which to touch her, and woke up feeling disgusted with himself.

Was she still out there, the doppelganger of a now-sacred body, allowed to live out the duration of her life in relative peace? If not, there would be nothing left of her; no one who made such intimate contact with the djinn walked away with their intellect intact, never mind their identity; the djinn would have hollowed her from the inside out. All that would remain of the woman would have been a primal fear that wouldn’t understand her situation enough to comfort herself with reason.

(Perhaps that was kinder; more and more Kim found understanding to be nothing more than a torturous way to drag out a single horrific act that took place when he was too young to remember.)

Today he followed her to god knows where, but ended up in a cemetery, aware of her observations although he was unable to see her. When she materialised his feet acted on their own to approach her. The sky spun faster and the horizon tilted; his hands acted reached out without his permission to wrap around the gold necklace. At this distance her pupils looked darker than black, and her mouth looked too long to fit on her face. He pulled her closer until her lips found his.

She moved fast. Her hands locked on his arms like talons. With more strength than a woman her size should have been capable of, she lifted him on the ground and pushed him down onto his back. Kim wasn’t a small man, and he was no longer slender. The heels of his hand pushed at the dirt and he tried to sit up, and to back away, but in a graceful fluid motion she sat on him, with one knee on either side of his thighs.

Was her face breath-taking? Did the curves of her body command Kim’s attention, and was he unable to take his hands away from the delicate dip in her wrist as she reached up to touch the side of his face? Was she beautiful?

Yes, to all of that. Kim was also frozen, unable to move away as she grasped the back of his neck and pulled her closer to him, collapsing the space between their mouths and biting his lips. She moved further up his body until she sat on his hips, and then his stomach. She held his shoulder and pushed him back onto the ground.

When she moved her mouth away from his he turned to his left, only to find the headstone that should have been less than a foot from his face a mile away. When he reached out to touch it, his arm stretched the whole distance after it. The horizon was tilting. The sky was a blur as it turned over them. The grass moved slowly; through the gates of the cemetery Kim could see people walking, frozen in place. No one was looking at them. Kim stared down the length of his arm; he watched his hand curl around a headstone from a distance.

Machikha Nash’s warm mouth found his neck. He felt her teeth scrape against the tendons, and her hands travel over his chest to his stomach. Where she’d held his arms ached deep within the muscle; it would bruise later, he could already tell. His skin burned where she touched him, but as she pressed her chest against his he felt the cold stealing his warmth.

Her hands found their way down his front and under his hem of his trousers, sliding against his skin and cupping them with her hands that were too hot; it was only a second before he felt how icy they were, and he froze when the cold hit him. Then he moved, grabbing her shoulders and trying to push her off him. As an answer she bit his shoulder. He pushed harder and tried to squirm away, but she didn’t ease her hold on his neck. Kim wasn’t a stranger to being bitten like this, but her teeth felt new. He had the most horrid thought, that she had already torn through several layers of skin and muscles and that when she let go, without her teeth to plug the wounds, he would bleed out in this cemetery.

He felt her hands cradling him, her skin sliding against his. Kim tried to twist away but she only pressed herself harder against his hips, pinning him there. How heavy she was felt disproportional, but had she ever really been small? Hadn’t he – and everyone – who looked at her always been taken by how the world moved around her, bending itself around her heaviness?

Kim closed his eyes.

The grass beneath his head was damp. It soaked through the back of his shirt and cooled his skin. The air towering over him was cool, too. He couldn’t place how she felt any longer; he felt that he was hard not by how her hand felt on his cock but by how his body strained without his consent, pushing itself closer to her hands, and by how warm he felt in his thighs – how his stomach clenched like he was looking out at an abyss, prepared to sink at any minute, just as soon as he jumped. The rest of her was too hot, or too cold; like metal as her shoulders brushed against his, and like sand; like the night sky in the desert: filling up every part of his vision and commanding his awareness, but impossible to reach. And beautiful in its distance.

He felt himself sink (and felt the cool rush of air moving up the front of his stomach, the top of his thighs as she moved). His neck ached; he touched it and felt his own warm blood. It was only when he felt the weight on his body lighten that he looked, and immediately wished he hadn’t.

Her face leaned over his, the gold necklace falling between them and settling on his chest. Except, it wasn’t just her face; the longer he stared at her the further past her face he saw: past her full lips and the curve of her jaw, and past the radiant white of her eyes into something deeper than he’d ever seen before. It was reminiscent of his recent venture to Ararat, when he nearly fell into the chasm.

Perhaps he should have; he felt himself teetering on the edge of that same fall now, but couldn’t look away.

That thought dragged him back to the present. This was the same fall he had stood in front of for his entire life. Nothing about this was new.

And suddenly he was in his own body again; suddenly he was _here_ , grasping at the last of his identity. The grass tickled the back of his neck, and the cold stone headstone scraped against his hand where he still held it. The body of Machikha Nash moved above him. He felt her gaze on him. Her intentions became clear to him in a single moment of absolute clarity, and then the clarity left him. Kim gave in, letting his heart beat in time with hers.

He saw himself under her, and although his body was taller and heavier than hers he felt its smallness compared against everything Machikha Nash was. It was malleable, like the body it was in. Her movements felt clumsy to her.

And he understood how the djinn moved, and what it saw in the world: he understood when it looked around itself, when it looked through the eyes of this woman, what it was taking. The feeling was visceral, raw as a nerve being stroked, and familiar from the distant part of Kim that was still himself.

It was possession; the act of wanting, and taking.

He felt himself be pulled inside it, and felt his body through its hands. He was soft; the pressure exerted on the body was uncontrolled, and the ease required to reach inside him was too little. When it leaned over him again his body felt neither hot nor cold, but was simply a solid presence that it was aware of, and that was available for it handle by means of the body. It would see no difference between raping him and biting him; it did not need to eat to take sustenance, but simply for the sake of taking.

Kim didn’t feel when she finished, or when her attention wavered from him. He knew he was lying on his back, dizzy and breathless. He was in a cemetery, but not dead. He was cold. Damp. Kim brought one muddy hand to his face and wiped the back of his palm over his mouth; he realised then that he was crying. When he pushed himself up he found he was shaking, too. It took too much effort to refasten the buttons on his trousers and adjust his clothes.

When he finished he looked across the cemetery and caught sight of Machikha Nash wandering between the headstones. The buildings stayed fixed on the horizon, and the sky remained undisturbed as her focus moved along. Her movements were elegant. She fit neatly in with the landscape, like it had all been built around her. For a brief moment he felt a flicker of the vibrations emitted by her presence as his heartbeat slowed, but it passed quickly.

When his minders found him again he was leaning against one of the headstones. They didn’t come more than a few meters from him, remaining a clear several rows away from him. Kim felt them watch him, but after having been the unwilling recipient of Machikha Nash’s gaze it didn’t bother him how they stared – it didn’t hurt to be watched. With their attention on him Kim reassembled his identity, neatly slotting the pieces he still had of himself back into place.


End file.
